Leo sat at the kitchen table. Inessa had warmed some water on the fire. She poured it into a bowl. Nesterov dropped a cloth in the water and Leo was left to clean his face. His lip had been split. His eyebrow was bleeding. The pain in his stomach had subsided. Pressing a finger over his chest and ribs, nothing felt broken. His right eye was swollen. He couldn’t open it. None the less, it was a relatively cheap price for getting Nesterov’s attention. Leo wondered if his case would sound any more convincing inside than outside and if Nesterov could be so dismissive in front of his wife, with their children sleeping in the room next door.
— How many children do you have?
Inessa replied:
— We have two boys.
— Do they walk through the woods on their way to school?
— They used to walk that way.
— Not any more?
— We make them walk through the town. It takes longer and they complain. I have to walk with them to make sure they don’t slip into the forest. On the way back there’s nothing we can do but trust them. We’re both at work.
— Will they be walking through the forests tomorrow? Now the killer has been caught?
Nesterov stood up, pouring tea and putting a glass down in front of Leo.
— Would you like something stronger?
— If you have it.
Nesterov took out a half-empty bottle of vodka, pouring three glasses, one for himself, one for his wife and one for Leo.
The alcohol stung the gash on the inside of Leo’s mouth. Perhaps that would do it good. Nesterov sat down, refilling Leo’s glass.
— Why are you in Voualsk?
Leo dropped the bloody cloth into the bowl of water, rinsing it and placing it against his eye.
— I’m here to investigate the murder of these children.
— That’s a lie.
Leo had to win this man’s trust. Without his help, there was nothing else he could do.
— You’re right. But there was a murder in Moscow. I wasn’t ordered to investigate it. I was ordered to sweep the matter aside. I did my duty in that respect. Where I failed was in refusing to denounce my wife as a spy. I was considered compromised. As a punishment I was sent here.
— So you really are a disgraced officer?
— Yes.
— Then why are you doing this?
— Because three children have been murdered.
— You don’t believe Varlam killed Larisa because you’re sure that Larisa wasn’t this killer’s first victim. Am I right?
— Larisa wasn’t the first victim. She couldn’t have been. He’d done it before. There’s a chance the boy in Moscow wasn’t the first victim either.
— Larisa is the first murdered child we’ve had in this town. That’s the truth, I swear it.
— The killer doesn’t live in Voualsk. The murders were by the train station. He travels.
— He travels? He murders children? What kind of man is this?
— I don’t know. But there’s a woman in Moscow who’s seen him. She saw him with the victim. An eyewitness can describe this man to us. But we need the murder records from every major town from Sverdlovsk to Leningrad.
— There are no centralized records.
— That’s why you have to visit each town and collect their case files one by one. You’re going to have to persuade them and if they refuse, you’re going to have to talk to the people living there. Find out from them.
The idea was outlandish. Nesterov should’ve laughed. He should’ve arrested Leo. Instead, he asked:
— Why would I do that for you?
— Not for me. You’ve seen what he does to these children. Do it for the people we live with. Our neighbours, the people we sit next to on the train, do it for the children we don’t know and will never meet. I don’t have the authority to request those files. I don’t know anyone in the militia. You do: you know these men — they trust you. You can get those files. You’ll be looking for incidents of murdered children: the cases can be solved or unsolved. There’ll be a pattern: their mouths stuffed with bark and their stomachs missing. Their bodies will probably have been found in public spaces: the woods, or rivers, maybe near train stations. They’ll have string tied around their ankles.
— What if I find nothing?
— If there are three, which I’ve stumbled across by chance, there will be more.
— I’d be taking a great risk.
— Yes, you would. And you’d have to lie. You couldn’t tell anyone the real reason. You couldn’t tell any of your officers. You can trust no one. And in return for your bravery, your family might end up in the Gulag. And you might end up dead. That is my offer.
Leo stretched out his hand across the table.
— Will you help me?
Nesterov moved to the window, standing beside his wife. She didn’t look at him, swirling the vodka at the bottom of her glass. Would he risk his family, his home, everything he’d worked for?
— No.
South-Eastern Rostov Oblast West of the Town of Gukovo
2 April
Petya was awake before dawn. Sitting on the cold stone steps of their farmhouse, he waited impatiently for sunrise so that he might ask his parents’ permission to walk into town. After months of saving he had enough to buy another stamp which would bring him to the last page of his album. On his fifth birthday he’d been given his first set of stamps by his father. He hadn’t asked for them but he’d taken to the hobby, cautiously at first and then more and more doggedly until it had become an obsession. Over the past two years he’d collected stamps from other families working on the kolkhoz—Collective Farm 12, the farm his parents had been assigned. He’d even struck up casual acquaintances in Gukovo, the nearest town, in the hope of obtaining their stamps. As his collection had grown he’d bought a cheap paper album in which he stuck the stamps, gluing them in neat rows. He kept this album inside a wooden box which his father had built for him with the express purpose of protecting it from mishap. Such a box had been necessary since Petya had been unable to sleep at night, constantly checking that water wasn’t leaking in through the roof or that rats hadn’t eaten the precious pages. And of all the stamps he’d collected he loved the first four that his father had given him the most.
Every now and then his parents gave him the occasional kopek—not a spare kopek, since he was old enough to realize there was no money to spare. In exchange he always made sure he did a little extra work around the farm. It took so long to save up that months went by and all he could do was contemplate which stamps to buy next. Last night he’d been given another kopek, the timing of which his mother had considered unwise, not because she was opposed to him buying stamps, but because she knew it meant that there was no chance he’d sleep that night. She’d been right.